Second Life Is Indefensible

by Alphaville Herald on 11/09/07 at 10:29 pm

“banning griefers is a worthless excercise” – ACS Dreamland
PN rumored to be preparing megaprim-based weapons

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

Snapshot_004
Dreamland construction forgot to auto-return the particle spam emitter

The landlord’s role in the Second Life virtual land business may be getting a bit more challenging. Consider the group notices from Anshe Chung’s Dreamland over the last week. ACS Dreamland is the largest land rental/resale operation in the metaverse and are presumably expert at virtual land management. Despite their expertise, a certain note of desperation is evident in the messages sent to Dreamland residents.

September 6th, Dreamland honcho Master Quatro observed that “banning griefers is a worthless exercise” because “we have almost 600 sims and are only allowed 300 estate bans”. This raises the possibility of reverse economies of scale – all estates in SL have the same size ban list, but super-sized land barons have more targets for griefing.

After a weekend of amusing or exasperating pranks – depending on your perspective – Mr. Quatro sent a message yesterday suggesting, “it’s time for another public letter to the Lindens about preventing this abuse but at least taking care of it when it happens”. I’m a fan of Master Quatro – but if the last open letter to the Lindens was a dog, the furries I know would say that dog don’t hunt. What is going to make the game gods pay attention this time? Residents holding their breath until they turn blue?

Dreamland_2
shortly before Tanadar Mighty was disappeared by Linden spooks – along with all his prims

Master Quatro’s call for more letters to the Lab appeared on my iMojo wire while I was in-world so I teleported to Dreamland hoping for some pictures, and found that Mr. Quatro was right when he said the Lindens “have done nothing in an hour since it was reported”. I had a great time flying though particle spam originating from Dreamland construction-owned sims – perhaps the construction workers didn’t get the memo about turning on auto-return? Paying residents of Dreamland were sent a message September 4th, begging them to set autoreturn on their land so that griefer’s objects would not persists in the upscale community. Good help is hard to find.


rumors of the “tree”

After flying though blizzards of particle picture spam got boring, I contacted an unverified resident who claims ties to the Patriotic Nigras griefing group – but prefers to remain unnamed. My source said that the particle spam I was seeing outside Dreamland’s central sim was nothing special – instead I should be concerned about a much more serious weapon currently under development by the PN – the “tree”.

According to my source, the “tree” uses self replicating megaprims to quickly cover entire sims. It is unclear if this is possible, or if my source was simply role-playing, but self-replicating megaprims might well be able to span no-build plots, and cover large areas with a small number of prims – the sort of approach that could sidestep the Linden’s grey goo fence.

Snapshot_003
spaming the sky

Does this mean we are facing the imminent destruction of the metaverse? This seems unlikely. The more successful a self-replicating prim attack is, the faster the culprit can be identified, assuming the ownership of the automatically reproducing prims is not faked. Once you cover the world in your prims the evidence is everywhere. Of course, this presumes that the Lindens are actually responding to abuse reports — based on Master Quatro’s comments there is some question about Linden responsiveness.

Predictably, the next act in this theatrical production will be calls for mass bans of any groups that might perhaps possibly be associated with the troublemakers. That will buy all of ten minutes peace while the contestants in the stupendous ironic badass race create new alt accounts. Why was it the Lindens decided they don’t need billing information on file for new players again?

Dreamland_6



8:37 am September 11:
Group Notice From: Dreamland ACS

We have returned the replicating objects that griefers left all over Dreamland yesterday. Please IM Master Quatro if you have any remaining objects still flying around your property. I will remove them promptly.

This attack was not limited to Dreamland. Many sims were affected grid-wide.

Thank you for your patience.

MQ


6:07 pm september 10:
Group notice: Grid Wide Griefer Attack
Group Notice From: Master Quatro

The present griefing attack is happening on hundreds of sims all over the SL grid. It is not limited to your sim nor to Dreamland. It’s all over the grid. I think it’s time for another public letter to the Lindens about preventing this abuse but at least taking care of it when it happens. They have done nothing in an hour since it was reported.

MQ


5:22 pm september 10:
Group notice: Griefers Self Replicating Prims
Group Notice From: Master Quatro

Please right click on one of these objects if you see it, then click “more” “more” “Report Abuse” .. Maybe if enough of us complain they will do something about this.

MQ


september 6:
Group notice: Estate Banning of Griefers
Group Notice From: Dreamland ACS

We have almost 600 sims and are only allowed 300 estate bans. Banning griefers is a worthless excercise since they have hundreds of alts and switch from one to another quickly thus rendering our bans useless. The best protection you have is to use autoreturn and/or land tools options to prevent their objects and replicating scripts from landing on your land. Please use them or ask an angel for help on how to set them.

MQ


september 4:
Group notice: ONLY YOU CAN STOP GRIEFERS !
Group Notice From: Master Quatro

We have asked you to set autoreturn or use options to prevent griefers from dropping objects all over your land. If you are unwilling to do that then we can’t help you when griefers attack your land and leave all this garbage. Access restrictions and security orbs don’t help you. SET AUTORETURN or use LAND OPTIONS to prevent a mess on your land. Call an angel if you need help with this.

MQ


61 Responses to “Second Life Is Indefensible”

  1. DaveOner

    Sep 14th, 2007

    I’m glad there’s a person who makes a living selling land in a video game here to comment on the quality of peoples’ RL lives.

    Get a real job.

    Loved your woman for an hour a few years ago

    D1r

  2. Maldavius

    Sep 15th, 2007

    Im really butthurt

  3. mootykips

    Sep 15th, 2007

    “Being anonymous only make you a coward, not powerful…”

    Au contraire, being anonymous gives you the power to say what you wish without hurting your reputation in an online community, and being able to speak freely is the most powerful thing of all in said communities. It also encourages the illusion of having more people in your community than you actually have, and discourages paranoia and authority, both relatively good things as far as I’m concerned (and I’d know!).

    Until the Paranoid N-igras get their weapons to actually troll people (something that the megaprims obviously do not do), the attacks will stay unnoticed by most. Had the PN stayed small-scale trolling groups, something that I admit was a mistake not to encourage in my time as e-leader, they’d be way more famous than they are now.

    Crashing things is easy. Shock and awe doesn’t cut it anymore. You either crash the entire grid (like we did with the asset servers) or you piss people off so much they bitch about it (like Prok and Yiffy Yaffle). Kalel – the PN don’t troll anyone anymore, they just crash shit. And that’s reasonably effective, but it’s not nearly as effective as the alternatives. See: W-Hat, who were able to shoot a few penises at Anshe Chung and got national attention. See: Edwards, who had a few dicks on his e-lawn and managed to get PN national attention, though none of it would be noticed if they just shut up and took it like SL does daily.

    It reminds me of the Encyclopedia Dramatica guys that got butthurt because even the shittiest trolls from PN were able to hop on #ed and piss off the “lulzcows” like Blargh, eventually getting to the point where PN was kicked off the network, and ED itself was trolled and made a “state of the union” address denouncing the “chanfags” who gave them all their content. Some say I even inadvertently trolled PN by leaving in the way I did (and I probably could have done massive damage by claiming that I was Angel Fluffy and pissing them off even more, while ruining AF as well). It’s really that easy. And until PN can stop seeing themselves as a group of sim-crashers with a hierarchy and planned raids (W-Hat Delux/Voted-5) they’re going to keep burning themselves out on useless attacks. No offense to ^ban^ and codec who I know can script, you’re just going the opposite direction you should be going. If you want to piss people off, you need to piss them off, not just shoot a bunch of lolcubes in the sky and wait until the sim reboots.

  4. someclubowner

    Sep 15th, 2007

    Here’s a thought to everyone who’s having trouble with being ‘indefensible’ against girefers: Leave the mainland, and ALL yourproblems are solved!

    Lolcubes and whatnot CANNOT enter your land from a neighbouring sim that isn’t using the proper estate tools, if there IS no other sim nextdoor.

    The only thing anyone can pull off in our club, is sound and particle spam. And the max number of bans on land is not an issue either, there’s plenty of tools and gadgets to get rid of undesired elements going around the land tools, so anyone who pulls something, is gone within 5 minutes. Their alts just the same.

    SL is not indefensible. The mainland perhaps is, but the rest definately isn’t.

  5. Tizzers Foxchase

    Sep 15th, 2007

    Mooty~

    That is what I have been saying for the last 6 months! Crashing sims is old, it’s boring, and honestly accomplishes nothing. If anonymous started using its brain, it would be a scary hive-mind force to be reckoned with. There are a lot of intelligent people in PN. If you can harness that power, you’ve conquered the internet.

  6. d3adlyc0d3c

    Sep 15th, 2007

    @Mooty,
    if you had been present then you would know that PN has shifted focus dramatically to trolling, groups such as ‘Justice League, Unlimited’, ‘Jews of Second Life’ and others are constantly being lulzmilked with great success. We didn’t fucking crash the grid with those lulzturtles either, it wasn’t intended to crash anything. It was intended to be annoying as shit and shout some obscenities. I literally got HUNDREDS of pissed off IM’s from ppl. It was win, kthx.

  7. Second Lulz Vigilante

    Sep 15th, 2007

    @d3adlyc0d3c

    “if you had been present then you would know that PN has shifted focus dramatically to trolling, groups such as ‘Justice League, Unlimited’, ‘Jews of Second Life’ and others are constantly being lulzmilked with great success.”

    But that isn’t what you PN guys like to brag about though, cf. the YouTube link you posted in this thread.

    And your newly reorganized recruitment process is still the PN version of “curtains and a dog”. lol!

  8. mootykips

    Sep 15th, 2007

    That as well. The meme test and the attempt to keep out “spies” was the stupidest thing PN ever did and I regret ever instituting it. It should have stayed open to all ala /i/nsurgency with idiots being fished out via stupid posts.

  9. atxscubasteve22

    Sep 19th, 2007

    Wherever mooty goes, he unloads a pile of drama, it’d make sense if he were a closet furry

  10. MachineCode

    Sep 19th, 2007

    “And yet people are against ID verification which would easily get rid of this aspect of things. Sure it wouldn’t solve it but it sure would slow it down some!

    You guys just don’t get it. You can either have freedom OR security. Not both!”"

    Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

    LOL PARADOX. You suggest the restricting ID verification — which I would never use, griefer or not — as a requirement. And the quote you used promotes freedom over safety.

    Better to die free than live free, eh? lolmartyrs.

    There are no politics here. No personal vendettas, no conspiracies or deception. We do not fear those who threaten repercussions, nor seek to confound you failures with elaborate schemes. We wear our intentions on our sleeves. We do it for the lulz.

    TWINKIE HOUSE!

  11. Riley Leominster

    Jan 17th, 2008

    We do it for lulz

    You do it becaues you have low self esteem IRL.

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